According to Business Insider Intelligence estimates, connected-home device shipments will grow at a compound annual rate of 67% over the next five years, much faster than smartphone or tablet device growth, and hit 1.8 billion units shipped in 2019. Homes around the world are going to be smarter and more connected.

British Gas, an energy and home services provider based in the UK, is one of the pioneers connecting homes with smart energy devices. In 2015, British Gas starts to use Cassandra to crunch data collected from customers’ boilers – to predict when they might fail.

Cassandra supports British Gas’ Connected Homes unit, an innovative startup based on lean principles that operates Hive, its smart thermostat which allows users to see energy usage in their homes through a dashboard on their smartphone.

The popularity of the Hive app has resulted in an unprecedented stream of data, which is currently pooled from 300,000 customers and processed by a team of 16. To support this scale, the team uses a combination of Apache Spark and Cassandra, giving British Gas “the ability to process the data quickly and give people an increasingly near real-time experience” head of data analytics, Jim Anning.

Earlier last year, British Gas did an interview with ComputerWorldUK about their innovation and how Cassandra would be leveraged to help collect and crunch the data, to find more details about their use cases, read the full story here.